Band:	Kenos
Album:	X-Torsion
Style:	Progressive death metal
Release date:	February 05, 2010
A review by:	Bas

01. Room Sexteen
02. 2012 Omega Assimilation
03. Encounter
04. I Remember
05. X-Torsion
06. Bitchswitch
07. Erocktika (Desert Dancing Raven Queen)
08. Revolver Revival
09. AddictionXtinction
10. Eyes Of Hurricane part. 2

Let's see, what's this? I can't read the first letter of the logo on the cover art - adorned by a statue(?) with ugly tits and a weird hairdo - but the info sheet tells me the band's called Kenos. The info sheet also tells me that they play techno-melodic death metal, that this album is a magnificent opus, that it's technical and features 'American' riffing, electronic loops, orchestral arrangements, classical and ethnical contaminations.

Now let me tell you something, info sheets can never be trusted 100% and X-Torsion is a huge mess at its best and pretty much the same (although smellier) at its worst. Imagine a songwriter suffering from paranoid schizophrenia in addition to a complex that involves wanting to create music that's as diverse as possible, taking control of a death metal band. Anyone who knows my tastes in music, knows that I like me some variety. But there's a huge gap between artfully crafting different styles of music to one harmonic song and forcing many different styles together into a disjointed heap of garbage. Kenos didn't manage to bridge that gap.

Of course treasure can sometimes be found in piles of trash and it's the case here too. X-Torsion contains a fair number of great riffs, the opening of the title song being a good example and some of the atmospheric pieces - the acoustic interlude "I Remember" and the outro come to mind - are really nice too. The good things are overshadowed by the bad though. I'll have to praise the vocalist for singing in a different style on each song, but then again he isn't all too good at singing any of them. As for symphonic backgrounds, electronic voice samples, operatic female singing, hyper-melodic bridges, black metal intros and tons of weird breaks - one word - mess.

Funny fact: It turns out one of my predecessors, ex-reviewer Undercraft already reviewed their 2004 album a couple of years ago. By the looks of it he came to very similar conclusions in his review as I came to in mine. Check it out if you want, as almost everything he wrote there applies to this album too.